THE NATIVE SPEAKER IS THE WORST ENEMY

Reading Ilya U. Topper’s article in the Instituto Cervantes’s El Trujamán, “¿Quién asesinó al verbo matar?” (July 29, 2026), in which he bemoans the chaotic drift of Spanish into the passive voice, giving examples with matar, I find myself in agreement with him. I have pointed this out several times because, although the passive is part of the Spanish language, its use differs from English, and Spanish has ways of avoiding it and employing the active voice, which, according to Strunk and White, “is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive.”

However, I differ with Topper on the reason why the passive voice is slowly replacing the active voice. He states: “El origen de esta evolución del idioma casi con certeza es un error en las traducciones del inglés, fomentado por los programas multilingües: aunque Google Translate es hoy bastante versátil según el contexto, la frase aislada «he was killed» sigue traduciéndose como fue asesinado”, blaming human translators and AI programs. And then he asks the pithy question: “Pero ¿por qué se ha expandido tan rápido este modelo de mala traducción?” only to give us, I believe, the wrong answer: “La respuesta probablemente esté en la gramática: también se ha calcado del inglés (y antes del francés) el uso pródigo de la voz pasiva.”

I beg to differ. I have held for many years the view that most translators, writers, journalists, and telecasters are tempted to calque, to mirror, the English passive voice because they have a poor grounding in Spanish, their mother tongue. It is an error to believe that, merely because a translator is a native Spanish speaker, he necessarily possesses a good foundation in the language. If young, he has not had the time to read the classics and thereby augment his vocabulary, grammar, and phraseology.

Thus we read Topper’s example: “Una mujer había sido atacada y asesinada por un oso,” which shows that whoever wrote that sentence does not have a deep grounding in Spanish and is ignorant of the meaning of the verb asesinar. A bear can matar a woman; it cannot asesinar her.

Being a native speaker is not sufficient, and that is why I say that the native-born speaker is the language’s worst enemy. I fear that, in this state of affairs, the passive voice will eventually come up trumps.